Climate change has got a lot to do with science.
Science is a doorway to figure out the wacky things about our world. It helps us understand how things work – it’s the reason that we know why climate change is happening.
But not everyone has access to science. Especially not the people who are dealing with the climate crisis firsthand. As things get worse, they’re going to need to understand what’s going on. Putting science in the hands of the people gives them the chance to adapt.
But these same people live in the lap of nature, and they’ve got their fair share of wisdom about it. So what can we do to bring their knowledge back to science, to work together in solving this crisis of epic proportions?
Welcome to In Our Nature, a podcast by the ECOBARI Collaborative that uncovers what we need to do to protect ecosystems, so that they can protect us. I’m your host, Isha, and in this series, we explore our deep connections with the natural world, and how restoring nature can help us adapt to climate change. ECOBARI is a shared initiative of nine founding partners, and is convened by the Watershed Organisation Trust.
In our third episode, we visit some of WOTR’s field sites to meet local community members and get their take on our big question: is science really a two way street?
First stop: Kumbharwadi village.
The community center in Kumbharwadi is home to a curious set of maps. But they’re not just maps, they’re more like 3D models made of different layers of cardboard.
BG: If you took a picture of our village with a drone camera, it looks something like that.
That’s Bhagwat Ghaghre, the Secretary of the village Water Committee, telling me that this is actually a model of their village and the groundwater aquifer that’s below it. He says the process of making it fundamentally changed the way his community thinks about water. And the first time I heard that, I was like, how did they figure out what an aquifer is just by building a cardboard model?
To understand that, he says, we need to go back to the beginning.
The village of Kumbharwadi in Maharashtra’s Ahmednagar district has a long history with WOTR, which goes all the way back to the early 90s. Back then, Kumbharwadi was experiencing pretty intense water stress, so WOTR supported the local community with watershed development, and for a while after that, Bhagwat says everything was great.
BG: After getting access to a lot of water, people started growing sugarcane. After their incomes increased, people started deepening their wells. The entire irrigated area increased. And people really benefited a lot, our entire village benefited.
It was an incredible thing for farmers in this drought prone region to have access to water all year round. It allowed them to cultivate more crops, more water intensive and high-value and water-intensive crops like sugarcane and just generally earned them a lot more money.
BG: So this went on, pretty well, from 2002 to around 2007–08. Then some problems started cropping up, like we started running out of drinking water in the summer, our sugarcane crop failed. A lot of fights broke out in the village and everyone was stressed.
But you know how it is, all good things must come to an end. People are pulling out a lot of groundwater, and the same old problems start cropping up again. Wells run dry in the summer, the winter crop goes bust, and naturally, the people sit up and take notice.
Now nobody wants to be back where they started. But back then, people didn’t quite get how their water use would impact other people in the village. They saw it more as personal property. It was more like, “hey, this is my well, this is my water.”
BG: This is my well, and the water in my well is mine!
So now the challenge is to convince people that this isn’t just your water, this is coming from an underground aquifer that’s not just shared amongst the people of your village, but is actually shared amongst many different villages. And guess what? It’s invisible. So you have to change the way you behave, the kind of crops you grow, the kind of money you’re gonna make, based on this thing that you can’t even see.
Wow, good luck with that.
So how do you make the invisible visible, and how do you do it in a way that makes the community trust and believe you?
Bhagwat tells us a little bit more about what went down back then.
BG: A geologist came from an organisation called WOTR, who showed a video in our village. And in that video, we saw that if five drops of rain fall, only one drop of that is absorbed into the ground.
So a geologist comes down from WOTR’s research team, the WOTR Center for Resilience Studies, or W-CReS, and starts showing them this is how water percolates. You already know this because of watershed development, but we want to get into it with you a little bit deeper.
BG: So they did an extensive survey in our village for a month, month and a half on what the conductivity of the ground is, what the water table is like, and more.
So this geologist hangs out in the village for a month, month and a half, does a bunch of surveys, and then, you know, they have a sense of what the aquifer looks like. But they don’t talk about it directly with the community. Instead, they say, let’s make a map.
BG: A model of our village. And by cutting cardboard paper, we made a model of our village.
And this map has got a bunch of details about where the mountains are, where the roads are, where people’s homes are, where the village temple is, the whole shebang.
BG: Where is our house? Or where is the village temple? So that people started to realise that we are making a map of where we are.
So it helps build this sense of familiarity that okay, this map shows me where I am. This is my village, and it becomes a nice way to get people involved with the process, because then they’re like, Hey, you didn’t put in my fruit orchard. Where’s my fruit orchard?
BG: “Arrey, my fruit orchard is here, but you didn’t show it on the map.” So we added the fruit orchard.
And eventually they get to a point where everyone has agreed to this map that they’ve built, and then the geologist says, all right, so this is what your village looks like above ground, and I’ve been studying what it looks like below ground.
BG: The model of the village above ground was made with the people. The model of the village below ground, that the geologist made after doing a survey of the village for a month and a half, and presented it to the people, saying “this is how it is in your village.” They didn’t make the below ground model with the people, because people didn’t know [how the village looks below ground]. But they knew this much – our well has water at 30-35 feet, and [the model shows that] the aquifer is at 35 feet.
Firstly, the people have already started to build some trust, because they’ve been seeing this person working in their village for a while. And then they see that the level of water in their wells, which are marked out on the map that they’ve made, correspond to the level of water that’s meant to be in the aquifer, according to what the geologist is saying. So they start to realize this water is not many little pockets. It’s actually one big pool.
BG: Kumbharwadi has 3-4 neighbouring villages and all of them share one aquifer, right? So even if we do a lot of work on managing water in Kumbharwadi, we won’t be able to see the impact of it.
So they come together, they make a committee amongst all the villages that share this aquifer to be able to have a real impact on the way they manage their groundwater.
Because if one village is responsible about the way they handle their water and the next one isn’t, they’re not going to be able to make much progress.
BG: Water literacy is one thing we learned through the process of making the aquifer model. People gained a lot of awareness about the subject of managing water.
Creating this model was a tangible way for the local community to understand and be involved in the science of how water flows through their landscape. That knowledge immediately changes the way they interact with the resource and with each other. It shows how empowering it can be to have access to scientific information and how communities can make long standing change when they do.
In Kumbharwardi’s case, managing their water better means that they can have access to water all the time, even when there is a drought or it’s really hot, all the things that get worse with climate change. But this isn’t limited to water. There’s a lot of different ways that science can help communities make decisions about how to keep themselves safe. Another example is early warning systems. If you know that a storm is approaching, you can be better prepared for it. You could stay indoors. You could make sure all your valuables are safe and dry. Local weather-based advisories and forecasts also help farmers plan better, to choose what to plant, when to plant, when to harvest, and basically reduce their risk.
So it’s clear that science can do a lot for communities, but what can communities do for science in return?
Nature makes Planet Earth a fascinating place to live. It’s intricate and wondrously weird, and its collective influence balances the Earth system. Think about it like this. Ecosystems currently absorb more than half of the carbon emissions we put in the atmosphere. More than half. That’s a lot.
But we’re putting a lot of strain on the world’s wild places, and climate change is making it worse. So we need more hands on deck, more people studying the world’s ecosystems to figure out exactly what is changing. What species used to be found in a certain place that just aren’t there anymore? Have they gone to different places? Have their niches changed? What species are managing to survive despite rising temperatures or floods or droughts? If we know all this, we can prioritise what we need to protect and how we can protect it. How do we help nature rebuild itself in a changing climate?
And you know who’s got a lot of information about what’s living in their neighbourhood? I’m heading to a village called Bhojdari to find out.
Bhojdari is home to a man named Ganpat Hande. Ganpat is somewhat of a celebrity in his local circles
IC: Has someone come to meet you?
GH: Go outside.
AS: Let’s cut the recording.
IC: Do you want to take a break and talk to them?
GH: No, no.
And also he really looks the part. He’s got these sunglasses that he had on the entire time that we were together, and he’s the Police Patil of his village. That’s a role that’s selected by the District Collector’s office to manage local affairs, which can be anything from festivals to family feuds.
But that’s not the only thing that Ganpat is known for. He actually has another claim to fame. The man is practically a gold mine when it comes to all the different kinds of wild edible plants that grow around his area.
GH: This is korpode. We make a bhaji with its flowers.
IC: This is aloe vera, right?
GH: Yes, aloe vera. We cook with its flowers.
IC: Oh. And this one, you were telling us about it in the morning, right?
GH: Yes, that one is tarota. We call it takda.
Wild edible plants are also called raan bhaji in Marathi, and they’re basically native species that grow without being cultivated. So Ganpat estimates there’s something like 3,000 varieties of these kinds of plants in India, and about 50 of those are found in his local landscape. And while some varieties grow year round. Monsoon is really their time to shine.
GH: The young shoots that come out at the start of the monsoon have the best taste.
He says that the young, tender leaves that come out during the monsoon are the yummiest. But people also eat different parts of different plants, not just the leaves, also flowers and roots and other things like that. He actually told me about a flower that’s so potent fitness influencers advertise it on YouTube as a way to build muscle mass.
GH: If you see videos on YouTube, you’ll see that the flower is used for gaining muscles.
When they’re not being used for bodybuilding, raan bhaji are usually prepared simply to allow their natural flavors to emerge.
GH: Masalas aren’t used when cooking raan bhaji – only onion, garlic, and chutney. So that the original taste doesn’t change.
Ganpat’s wife, Babi Tai, cooked some for me, and they were so delicious. And I also got to spend some time wandering around his little courtyard garden, where he gave me samplers of all the different plants he had on hand. And there was this full palette of sweet and sour and bitter and just all around wonderful. Everything from really thin, delicate leaves to fleshy, cactus-like branches. Never in my life have I felt more like a herbivore than in that moment.
Ganpat’s interest in raan bhaji started when he was still in school, when he would read about them in the Department of Agriculture’s farmers magazine, and he’s been documenting them since then, sometimes with the government, sometimes just on his own. His camera roll is chock-full of pictures.
GH: This is barda, we call it phondchichi bhaji.
AS: He has a huge collection.
He told us that one time he went to Harishchandragad, which is a forested mountain nearly 70 kilometers away from his village, to forage for rare and medicinal wild plants with some tribal or Adivasi friends of his.
GH: I went to Harishchandragad to look for medicinal herbs with some people from the Adivasi community.
Adivasi communities are incredible storehouses of knowledge about these plants, and Ganpat says he’s learned a lot from them.
GH: People from Adivasi communities know [about raan bhaji], which ordinary people don’t know about.
These plants are a great source of nutrition for tribal communities because they’ve got a lot of micronutrients
GH: Iron, phosphorus, manganese.
And they’ve got medicinal value too. For example, Ganpat was telling us about a plant that comes out during the monsoon, which is actually used as a natural treatment for jaundice, which is common in the season.
GH: When the first rain falls, a lot of people start to get sick. And there are some bhajis that help in the treatment of those diseases like jaundice.
And that’s just the one. There’s a whole lot more.
SB: We call this hadsan, it’s used to rejoin bones when they break. Those bones join back so well that even doctors can’t tell that they were broken, it doesn’t even show in the X-rays that there was a crack here. This is parijat, it has white flowers with five petals. People who have knee problems, they should boil its leaves and drink the water for 15-20 days. When doctors advise some patients to get a knee replacement, I advise them to do this for 2-4 months. And it’s free, right?
That’s Somnath Bontle, the headmaster of the local school, talking about all the different ways raan bhaji can be used as medicine. He is a good friend of Ganpat’s and has clearly caught the raan bhaji fever.
SB: This is tondavali.
IC: You get this in the market also.
SB: Yes, you get it in the market but it’s used to treat ulcers and other problems that you get in your mouth. When you chew them raw, it solves all mouth problems.
IC: Really? I get those ulcers sometimes, I’ll chew them.
SB: Yeah, chew them na.
Most of the students in his school, he estimates around 60%, are adivasis from the Mahadev Koli tribe. These children have grown up following their mothers on foraging expeditions in the forest, and they’ve become little libraries of knowledge themselves. So Somnath and Ganpat have this idea that, you know, we should really commemorate this knowledge. And so they planned a Raan Bhaji Mahotsav, or wild edible foods festival in their schools.
SB: Patil [Ganpat] was with me. I told the children 2-4 days in advance that we want to host this raan bhaji festival. And this is like an in-born skill for them, they can tell you about all of them, no problem. So we told each child, whichever raan bhaji you know, bring a sample of every single one. And the next day, we had samples of 60 different vegetables.
To prove his point, Somnath did a little experiment right there and then for us. He called the children who were around and just sent them off and said, just go collect some raan bhaji, come back in 10 minutes. And they did.
Children: This one is agada. This one is chitru kand, this one is yerad, this one is lal math.
They brought in a whole bunch of greens and purples and leaves and stems. The littlest boy in the group got these round green fruits that looked like unripe tomatoes, about which Somnath said, and I quote, that if you eat those, you won’t be leaving the bathroom for a long time. But on the bright side, they are pretty effective when used as biodiesel.
At one point, Ganpat said this amazing thing to me. He said that if you know how to identify raan bhaji, the entire landscape becomes something you can eat. Even the children we met at this school can identify so many different kinds of plants, and they can navigate forests like the back of their hands.
GH: Sometimes a lot of rain falls at once, sometimes it doesn’t rain at all. Sometimes there’s a 15-day gap in the rains, sometimes there’s a month-long gap. So there is a change in raan bhaji because of these shifts.
Ganpat talks about how raan bhaji is affected by shifting rainfall patterns. Too much and too little rain, both can be pretty destructive. That’s an issue, because the Indian monsoon is undergoing dramatic shifts. Many parts of India that typically received a lot of rainfall are becoming drier, while dry regions are starting to see more rain. We’re also seeing more extremes, intense periods of heavy rain and extended periods of drought. These kinds of changes are impacting the ecology of our country in significant ways.
Local communities are watching these changes happen. Ganpat’s story shows just how much communities know about what lives and breathes around them so they can be engaged to help us keep track of what’s actually going on.
An example of this is Keystone Foundation’s Barefoot Ecologist program, which works with tribal communities to track the effects of climate change in the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve. These communities work with researchers to get a dynamic picture of how flowering patterns, animal behaviour, and stream flows are changing, and they’re also acknowledged as co-authors on research papers. But the program also helps the community design their own forest management plans, by bringing together indigenous and scientific knowledge. Another example is Inuit communities in the Arctic, who’ve contributed their traditional knowledge to climate studies on changing sea ice. CGIAR, a global agriculture research organisation, also works with farming communities to identify effective adaptation strategies.
So clearly, there’s a lot of space to play here. Communities can manage a changing climate much better when they have access to science, and science can really benefit by tapping into the lived experiences of communities.
Thanks for listening to In Our Nature! Our podcast is supported by Honeywell Hometown Solutions India Foundation. If you like this episode, please share it far and wide to help us get the word out there. We’re super grateful for your support and your attention.
ECOBARI stands for Ecosystem-based Adaptation for Resilient Incomes. Our collaborative aims to spotlight and enable solutions that build climate resilience and sustainable livelihoods by restoring, protecting, and enhancing nature. It’s a shared initiative of nine founding partners with diverse areas of expertise, including rural development, action research, sustainable finance, nature conservation, and policy engagement. To learn more about ECOBARI, visit our website at www.ecobari.org
Speakers
- Bhagwat Ghagre, Kumbharwadi village
- Ganpat Hande, Bhojdari village
- Somnath Bontle, Bhojdari village
- Isha Chawla, Anchor, ECOBARI
- Amol Satpute, WOTR Communications
Sources
Chevallier R, Gosling A, Cramer L. 2024. Farmer-led adaptation: Best practice case studies. Accelerating Impacts of CGIAR Climate Research for Africa (AICCRA).
Nicholas G. 2018. When Scientists “Discover” What Indigenous People Have Known For Centuries. The Conversation & The Smithsonian.
Subramaniam, G. 2024. Uniting traditional wisdom with modern science, barefoot ecologists record climate impacts. Mongabay.
Prabhu, Shravan and Vishwas Chitale. 2024. Decoding India’s Changing Monsoon Patterns: A Tehsil-level Assessment. New Delhi: Council on Energy, Environment and Water.
Credits
Produced by Isha Chawla
Original score by Anurag Baruah
Sound effects from Freesound.org
Music from Epidemic Sound
Listen to the series here